It's kind of interesting reading Satoshi's own words about how bitcoins worked.If you stumbled across this website in January of 2009, would you run this program created by this random dude named Satoshi?

I did stumble across the website in early 2009. I was looking to see if there was any form of digital cash available which was similar to what had been discussed on the Cypherpunks mailing list years ago. However, Bitcoin seemed too new and didn't seem like a workable option because nobody used it. I ended up ignoring it and going with Pecunix instead for the particular project I was working on. It wasn't until over a year later that I came across the site again and took a serious interest in Bitcoin. It would have been nice to have been mining all that time.

"A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history." --Gandhi

From the page:"If the recipient is not online, it is possible to send to their Bitcoin address, which is a hash of their public key that they give you. ... This method has the disadvantage that no comment information is sent, and a bit of privacy may be lost if the address is used multiple times, but it is a useful alternative if both users can't be online at the same time or the recipient can't receive incoming connections."

It's funny that Satoshi seems to have considered sending coins to a Bitcoin address to be a secondary function; ie, just a "useful alternative", as he notes.

Bitcoin is the first monetary system to credibly offer perfect information to all economic participants.Cryptoasset rankings and metrics for investors: http://onchainfx.com